It’s hard to believe we missed this one from a couple of years back but we’re thankful that reader [Christian] tipped us off about it. This a Nintendo DS with two tablet pc screens being used as an external display. He’s using an FPGA but not to emulate the processor. It is translating the video data from the DS board into usable signal for the larger LCD screens. In the video after the break you can see that pen input has been implemented, with the FPGA sending location data back to the DS.
[Neal], the creator, priced the project out at around $580. It’s worth a lot more considering the know-how needed to get the video scaling and pen input right using the FPGA. It won’t fit in your pocket, but it doesn’t have a case either so it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Yes, we know, this is not a hack, yet it just has the vibe of something we’ll likely be seeing in many small form-factor systems and wearable hacks in the future.
The USB Wireless Handheld Keyboard is a diminutive keyboard and mouse replacement with a passing resemblance to a BlackBerry PDA — where the screen has been replaced with a laptop-style trackpad sensor. This seems a shoo-in for home theater PC use; it’s unobtrusive and won’t look out of place on the coffee table alongside the universal remote. But any tiny system requiring only occasional input could likely benefit.
The keyboard layout is funky as heck, though likely adequate for its intended use of couch web-surfing and interactive messaging (or whatever wild applications our readers will surely come up with). A USB wireless receiver and a charging cable are included in the $62 package. Video after the break…
The chill of autumn is upon us, and with it comes the awkward sport of trying to work touch-sensitive phones and gadgets with gloved fingers. One can try toughing it out with fingerless gloves, or we’ve seen some costly solutions in the forms of specialized gloves and capacitive-compatible styluses, but sometimes simple is best: all it takes is a few stitches of conductive thread in the fingertips.
Conductive thread is available from various sources; SparkFun Electronics comes naturally to mind, but most vendors carrying the LilyPad Arduino will stock a suitable thread as well. Don’t fret if you’ve never sewn before — just a few simple loops are required, and it doesn’t need to be especially tidy. In principle this should work for trackpads and capacitive mice as well, if you use those in the field. For multitouch devices, add a separate conductive bit to each fingertip.
[Incudie] tipped us off about a method to fix a borked HDD in your Xbox 360. Many of the one million consoles banned earlier in the month also had the hard disks scrambled making off-line gaming impossible as well. It turns out that this is caused by having a ban flag in the NAND chip on the motherboard. It has been discovered that because of wear levelling, the NAND will have two copies of the “secdata.bin” file which stores the ban flag. Please note, this will NOT allow the console to use Xbox Live, it just re-enables the HDD.
The quick and dirty of the fix is as follows: First the NAND is dumped from your Xbox 360 to a computer. After verifying the file, it can be opened in a HEX editor and the two copies of “secdata.bin” located. Once identified by date, the older version is injected on top of the newer to overwrite the ban flag.
Looks like this is not for the faint of heart, but if you got banned for modding in the first place this should be easy to pull off.
Tomorrow’s turkey day here in the United States. Do you fully expect your trashy neighbor to burn down his house while trying to cook a holiday feast? To see what’s in store for your neighborhood we’ve rounded up a great collection of idiots deep frying turkeys. Read the rest of this entry »
If you watched the video before reading the article (like we did) and started shaking in your boots at a voice controlled lock system, prepare to be disappointed. His spoken commands are actually to his son to press the appropriate keys on a keypad off screen, the lock is not actually voice controlled.
But still, [Michael Krumpus'] door lock is pretty astounding. By using a torn apart CD drive he easily attains a nice fast and smooth linear motion to bolt and unbolt his door. It wont open his door like some locks we’ve seen, but it will probably be added sometime in the future…right alongside voice commands.
How would you like to have a 3-axis accelerometer, pressure sensor, temperature sensor, RF wireless, and an LCD screen in a development package? What if we told you that you can have it in the form factor of a wristwatch offering from Texas Instruments? How much would you pay for such a device? Quit guessing, you can pick it up for just $49 with an estimated delivery in mid-February of next year.
Our tip-line has been packed with emails about this since it was announced on Monday. The device ships with the firmware to serve as a sports watch with heart rate monitor. The price is pretty good just for that functionality but this package also includes a USB programming and emulation dongle so that you can develop your own firmware. It looks like the included development software is written for Windows but we’re hoping you can get it running on other platforms as well.
The LCD is a segment display, so you won’t see DOOM running on board. That said, we expect your first project to turn this into a wireless controller using the buttons and accelerometer.
[Alpay] sent in this project he did recently. He was hired to produce a kiosk that would stand out to the kids at the event. He chose to make a bike riding game utilizing open source hardware and software. There was some thought put into what interface to use to make it easiest for people to just pick up and use. The ultimate decision was a simple one. Use real handle bars from a bike. As for software, they used Blender, the open source 3d creation program. The actual control is done via a pair of Arduinos, an accelerometer, and a pair of XBee modules.
He notes that blender is fully capable of accepting the serial input from the controller, but they opted to have the controller mimic keystrokes to make life easier on the developer, as well as make the controller usable on more games. Maybe if enough people ask really nice, he’ll release the source code for the controller.
Before we begin, let us soothe those first dreaded thoughts. No, the commodore was not destroyed in the process. They can simply clip the 16 wires they added to interface the keyboard and be back to stock. Breathe a sigh of relief, and enjoy the twypper, a twitter wall made from a commodore SQ1000.
[Alex] needed to make an interesting project for his companies Openspace/hack day. A friend, suggested a twitter wall, and that’s when [Alex] got the idea for a typewriter. After a quick search, he found oomlaut’s typewriter. They didn’t let that deter them from making their own version though. They found a nice fully functional commodore SQ1000 and began hacking. Ultimately they simply decided to use an Arduino to short the key switches to simulate typing. There are all kinds of details on the necessary steps to get the typing to function absolutely correct on the project page. Over all it was well done and we’re happy to see that it can be undone just as easily.
Sometimes we miss that old Etch a Sketch we had when we were kids. The challenge of producing a decent image using those two knobs was always fun and frustrating at the same time. This project lets us recreate this interface on our computer. The Hack a Sketch is a combination of an Etch a Sketch style input and a processing sketch to recreate the experience. They’re using an Arduino to interpret the inputs and feed it to the computer via USB. We really like this thing. Simplify the electronics and we could see this as a neat toy for sale somewhere like Thinkgeek.
